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Monday, April 02, 2012

Richard Prince on the Whitney Biennial

."After lunch I went over to the Whitney. For some reason I wanted to see the biennial. I'm not sure why. Before checking it out I went up to the fifth floor. That's where they hang work that's in the permanent collection. I'm glad I did. There was a gorgeous late fifties Lee Krasner painting hanging in a room of it's own. After staring, I walked down to the fourth floor and it looked like people were exercising on a huge black rubber matt that took up the entire floor. There were maybe fifteen people following the commands of a woman who was talking into a microphone... telling the fifteen people what to do. I think the fifteen people following the commands were people who had walked off the street. They kind of just "joined in". I've heard this type of activity in the art world is called "relational aesthetics"... or something like that... It felt like I was interrupting the "relation". I quickly got out of there. I walked down to the third floor and in the back there was a room filled with an artist's junk. There seems to be a room filled with an aritst's junk in every biennial I've ever been to. I'm not sure why this artist's junk was there. I walked around the corner and there were fifty Dana Shultz paintings on the wall. At least I think they were Shultz's paintings. (I walked by pretty fast). I skipped the second floor and went down to the lobby. What happened to the bookstore? There was none. There were some catalogues thrown out on tables that looked "remaindered"... what was there looked like a bake sale. I walked out of the Whitney having spent less than twenty minutes... fifteen of those standing in front of the Krasner."

9 comments:

Strange, this description mirrors my visit except I didn't bother looking for the book store and I stayed with a Morris Lewis for 10 minutes. I also notice the clipped pages from an astronomy textbook framed and scattered about the museum. I assume I was being reminded that its all about context?

This piece is ridiculous and smug. Shows how tired Prince's brand of irony has become. The biennial was really good. Maybe if he spent some time actually looking at some younger artists' work his recent paintings wouldn't be so DOA.

I won't defend Prince's work and I have not seen the Biennial, but I too felt like I was interrupting something walking in on instances of relational aesthetics at the Soap Factory in Minneapolis. There is always something a bit coercive about utopianism. Come join our free society: here are the parameters Those parameters can be primary colors and horizontals and verticals, or they can be some collective activity. One could say that I was unable to dislodge myself from the traditional art-viewing mode, wherein I want to observe an object. A hair needs to be split - watching people interact is different from interacting with something yourself, which for me can be very stimulating and curiosity-inducing. I guess there is always something coercive about art in general. One could say it is arrogant to impose form upon any material; except that such form can then enter a dialogue with other formed materials. One needn't apologize for liking to look at things. And I still think that Krasner is da bomb, keeping open questions about forming, completion, rhythm, and interior scale that for some were closed by 1957. It won't settle on being either a field or a picture of things.

The inclusion of Forest Bess' oeuvre is significant for the Whitney Biennial. He was a true outsider (albeit with NYC and intellectual ties), and "visionary artist" who died several decades ago. Prince's assessment points out the possibility of viewing much of the work through the lens of the outsider artist. When you have room after room, wall after wall filled with really smart, pedigreed MFA grads making work that looks like an outsider, it means something. Curatorially including Bess among this group points out a certain conceit to contemporary art practice.